The X Files’s Problem With Women’s Bodies

I was dubious about the new seasons of The X Files at the start. I still am dubious now that I’m watching them. But I’m glad they’re airing, because they’ve helped me put my finger on something that was nagging at my brain during my rewatch. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, until 11×05 “Ghouli.”

(spoilers to the end of that episode, and TW for mention of sexual violence)

In “Ghouli,” Mulder and Scully meet a very special supernatural being who has the mysterious power to turn what seems to be your everyday Monster of the Week into a stealth mythos episode: their (kinda) long-lost son, William. In season 9, Scully tearfully gave him up for adoption to protect him from all the evil government agencies that are The X Files‘s bread-and-butter. In “Ghouli,” we (and they) finally meet teenage William, now called Jackson by his adoptive parents.

We get to meet him because of the hilarious “joke” he played on his two girlfriends. Hahaha, he used his psychic powers to send both girls to an abandoned cruise ship and, get this, make them see each other as a creepypasta monster he made up.

Jackson underestimates them: he assumed they’d both scream and freak out and make a great YouTube prank video. Instead, they arrive armed and prepared to fight. They almost kill each other. The teaser ends with them both lying unconscious in pools of their own blood. If this were any other MOTW episode, they’d be dead. But because the monster is Scully’s kid, and we can’t be having the audience hate him, they live.

The writers made some interesting and thoughtful characterization choices for William/Jackson. He isn’t a preternatural mini-me of characters we know, although he shares some of their traits. He doesn’t immediately fall into the arms of his birth mother or seem to care about her as much as she does about him, which makes sense. And he’s no Marty Stu.

On the other hand, some of their choices feel odd. Jackson spends almost no time grieving or angry about his murdered adoptive parents–you know, the people who lovingly raised him. For some reason (i.e. so Scully could monologue over his body and do a DNA test), he pretends to be dead for a seriously long time, despite being able to make anyone think his dead body is still there while he himself slips away. And then there are his hobbies.

The show focusses on two that help us/the agents identify Jackson even when he’s in disguise. Jackson admires Malcolm X. Wonderful, though used hella appropriation-y in this episode.* And Jackson is into the PUA scene.

PUAs, or Pick-Up Artists, see heterosexual romantic relationships as a zero-sum game. Women are conquests to be “won” by playing the right moves, ones that treat potential romantic partners as prizes, not people. Using manipulative tricks like negging, men are supposed to bypass women’s allegedly universal defenses to get the sex they want.

Gross. And an understandable interest for a teen boy. The show’s attempts to give Jackson’s manipulations of his two (non-polyamorous-consenting) girlfriends a dude, niiice vibe are way, way grosser than having him be a kid making sexist mistakes, but that’s not what I’m writing about.

See, Jackson takes after his male biological relatives in a distinct way: like them, he has power. And, like them and the other powerful men of The X Files, he exercises that power on the bodies of women and girls.

For example, the Cigarette Smoking Man, who is definitely Jackson’s bio relative of some sort, though the details are hazy depending on whether you consider him a reliable source of information, kicks off the season by casually explaining how he raped** Scully (“with science!”) to re-establish his power to Skinner.

And it’s not just him. The Consortium/Conspiracy/bad guys may have power over all humanity, but the main ways they demonstrate that power to us, the audience, are on Scully’s body. They abduct her. They harvest her ova. They implant their own metal device in her. They give her cancer, and they cure it when it suits them. They create kids–first Emily, now (it seems?) William–with the eggs stolen from her, without her knowledge or consent. We hear stories about what they do to “the masses,” but the human actual-character-we-care-about face of their power is Scully.

Hold on a moment, you might object. There’s a lot of body trauma in The X Files. Mulder gets abducted and tortured over Season 8, when David Duchovny left the series. He literally dies, is buried, and then comes back to life. Krycek loses an arm. Mulder chases an alien artifact that makes him temporarily psychic/insane/both. Skinner gets infected with creepy nanos that let the bad guys kill him with a remote control.

True, but I’d argue that what gets done to the men feels qualitatively different than what gets done to Scully. The men’s bodies get threatened as means to a separate end or as a foreseeable and accepted result of actions they chose. Mulder gets abducted because he chases abduction–he runs after the UFOs in the season seven finale. Krycek and Skinner get hurt because somebody else wants something (to keep them from the black oil virus, to make them obedient) and sees attacking their bodies as a way to get it.

Scully isn’t chasing abduction. None of the bad guys wants anything from her except her body and what it can do. She gets taken against her will–sure, she chooses to get in that car with the Cigarette Smoking Man, but she’s not seeking an experience like abduction that she knows will cause her harm. Nobody is trying to control her behaviour–at best, they are trying to use her body as a way to control a man, Mulder. Her body–and Samantha’s before her–is considered an end in itself.

And only Scully gets violated in ways tied to her body’s reproductive and sexual potentials. Mulder doesn’t get his sperm stolen. He isn’t made infertile by what he goes through. Invasions that would require implants or probes in his anus or urethra aren’t part of the series mythos. He doesn’t have unknown biological children running around.

Just listing those potential ways the bad guys could have exerted power on Mulder’s body but didn’t gives a sense of the difference in the way they treat Scully and other female characters because they’re women. The idea of the aliens stealing Mulder’s semen/surgically making him shoot blanks? Feels squicky and weird in ways that him dying and being reborn don’t.

The all-male X Files writers room may not see the difference, but they know it’s there. Otherwise, why isn’t Mulder invaded the same way?

Because what actual plot point does it serve to showcase Jackson’s powers by having him psychically manipulate the romantic partners he’s already psychologically manipulating? What does that accomplish that wouldn’t also be accomplished by having him psychically manipulate male buddies or school bullies?

But instead, like his father/grandfather/whatever tf their relationship is now and the shadowy secret society of powerful men this whole show is about, Jackson showcases his power by manipulating the bodies of the women and girls he sees as sexual/romantic possibilities first, whole people second.

* FFS, Mulder, there is zero comparison between the name white adoptive parents gave to the white child, born into the same culture and religion as them, that they lovingly adopted with full consent of that child’s birth parent and a name given to slaves by their masters. Stop.

** Yeah, Chris Carter and CSM, that’s rape. It’s not about the motives/sexual satisfaction/biological-penis-using-ness of the rapist, it’s about the violation of Scully’s body without her consent.